What will happen in the next year?

March 30 2015

I recently attended Scale Summit. It’s
an unconference that’s
been running on and off for a few years. Every year there’s a regular
session of “What’s changed since the last Scale Summit?”. At this
session we go through any notes we have from
previous years
and discuss
what’s changed. Finally,
the session ends with those in attendance suggesting what they believe
will happen in the coming year.

Sessions at Scale Summit last forty-five minutes. In the end, we
didn’t have time to discuss what we believe will happen in the next
year and quickly joined the end of the day festivities.

The unconference was closed with a number of lightning talks, but two
highlights for me were talks about (removing) the use of gendered
words and another on looking after yourself and burnout. Following on
from the lightning talks, @jonty asked
all attendees what they thought would happen in the next year. Answers
varied from an increasing number of security vulnerabilities through
to greater adoption of Windows in the developer community.

I’m not sure why, but I didn’t put my hand up as the microphone went
around the room. But I have a hope for what it could be: greater
emphasis on happy, diverse, productive, and inclusive teams.

We’ve seen an increasing number of people talk about these topics
within technology. That’s a good thing. But large organisations
haven’t taken these topics as serious as they should be, though that’s
going to change. Evidence has shown that it affects the
bottomline.

For a while now people have been speaking at technology conferences
about scale; the problems they’ve solved and the war stories around
them. Some of those same people have grown up, have families of their
own, and are now likely running teams or organisations. I’m looking
forward to hearing about how they’re scaling their teams and
organisations over the coming year and how they’re building happy,
diverse, productive and inclusive teams.